Hey, U.K. fans! Want to get your shiny new copies of THE MERMAID autographed? Come see me on my first ever U.K. tour! I’ll be touring with Sarah Maria Griffin, author of SPARE AND FOUND PARTS, for all dates. Two dates will also feature V.E. Schwab (A DARKER SHADE OF MAGIC) and the London Picadilly date will feature Dhonielle Clayton (THE BELLES). I am so excited to meet all of you – hope to see you out on tour in late July/early August!

I’ve got several appearances coming up in the next few months so I’m collecting them here for easy reference. Some of these appearances don’t have full programming details yet – I will add them in as I receive those. Hope to see many of you this year!

I will be part of the massive sci-fi/fantasy book signing extravaganza hosted by the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, AZ on Wednesday May 24th from 7:00-8:00pm. The event takes place at the Hilton Scottsdale Resort at 6333 N Scottsdale Rd, Scottsdale, AZ. Also on hand will be Jim Butcher, Victoria Schwab, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Wesley Chu, Myke Cole, Sam Sykes, Aprilynne Pike and many, many more of your favorite science fiction and fantasy authors! You don’t want to miss this one.

I will also be at Phoenix Comic-Con from Thursday May 25th to Sunday May 28th. I am on seven panels and there are also two signing sessions, so please come see me if you are attending! Here’s my schedule:

Thursday May 25th

Fantasy and Magic in Literature :: North 126AB 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm

For many readers, fantasy was one of the first genres that led them to a love of books. From Lord of the Rings to Dungeons and Dragons to Harry Potter, these beloved stories were read and digested over and over. Fantasy and magic can also spawn everything from sorcery to the paranormal, and swords to urban environments. These authors will discuss their worlds and how, regardless of what academics say, fantasy is literature.

Writing Badass Women :: North 126C 10:30 am to 11:30 am

Complex female characters are thankfully becoming a staple in fantasy and science fiction. However, it can be a challenge to not succumb to well-worn tropes and societal norms when creating them. These authors are ready to share their firsthand experiences of creating badass women.

Get Me Out Of Here! :: North 126C 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm

Time for some cross-genre fun and maybe make one of our authors scream “Get me out of here!” We will be asking our authors questions about something outside their genre and let you decide if their answer holds up. Let’s see what a sci-fi writer knows about magic systems or a fantasy author knows about the Andromeda nebula.

3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Build A Story Workshop :: North 126C 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm

Ever wanted to help build a story framework and then flesh it out as bonafide fanfiction? Imagine doing it with award-winning authors from different genres. The goal is to build a story framework in an interactive environment and then flesh it out and make it your own. We may even Web publish some!

Romance is a part of life, as is sex, but how much is too much, and how do you do it well? Our panelists share the fun and challenges of having characters who fall in love with aliens, ghosts, the fae, and more.

Paranormal Fun :: North 126C 10:30 am to 11:30 am

Paranormal stories can be fun to read and even more fun to write, but what makes a good paranormal yarn? How do you avoid well-worn tropes and make already-tread ground interesting and fresh? Our paranormal panel is ready to share their insights on ghosts, poltergeists, and strange phenomenon.

Will you be at C2E2 on Sunday, April 23rd? I will! Come check out my panel with Danielle Paige, Ashley Poston, Tricia Levenseller, Gene Ha, and Brittany Cavallaro! I also might have some early LOST BOY copies to give away, so be sure to stop by the signing table afterwards.

You may think you know what really happened to Dorothy, Cinderella, and Alice but you have no idea. Come hear from the authors that are remixing your favorite fairytales (aka – tales as old as time) and adding the twists and turns that keep you turning page after page!

I’m so pleased to share that the cover and an excerpt for LOST BOY were revealed today on Entertainment Weekly – follow the link to check it out!

My American publisher, Penguin Random House, is giving away signed copies of ALICE and RED QUEEN as well as advanced copies of LOST BOY. Sign up here for a chance to win before December 30th! Since the books are coming direct from the publisher it is only open to US entrants – sorry about that!

I’m also excited to announce that Titan Books will be publishing LOST BOY in the U.K.

You can stay in the loop about everything LOST BOY by signing up for the newsletter at peterlies.com

Everything old is new again. Kinda. From Shakespeare to fantastic literature of the 19th Century to detecting tales of the early 20th Century, to “Wagon Train to the Stars” to adventures gone terribly wrong, the joy of these works comes in the blend of the familiar and the original.

RED QUEEN is out now at all fine bookstores, and it’s been getting some great reviews!

Publishers Weekly gave RED QUEEN a starred review, and said “…Alice must rediscover her own identity among the choices and challenges that face her and the past that continually tries to draw her back into madness. Alice’s ongoing struggle is to distinguish reality from illusion, and Henry excels in mingling the two for the reader as well as her characters.”

Barnes & Noble said “Henry’s revisionary take on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland continues to disturb and delight in the follow-up to 2015’s Alice…Henry brings her brutal, violent vision of Lewis Carrol’s classic to life with vibrant writing and unexpected twists” and made it one of their Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of July.

I did an interview on The Once and Future Podcast and talked about my writing process and the genesis of The Chronicles of Alice books.

And some great news for ALICE, too, which was recently released in the UK by Titan Books – it’s on the Guardian’s Best Recent Science Fiction and Fantasy Roundup. They say it “reads like a Jacobean revenge drama crossed with a slasher movie…It’s a deeply unsettling vision that works thanks to Henry’s complex characterisation of Alice.”

Alice recalled a young nurserymaid had once taken her on an outing to the docks, but only after obtaining Alice’s solemn promise that she would not speak of the incident to her parents. Alice was very small at the time, perhaps three or four, and was so excited by the prospect that she promised immediately, would have promised anything to be allowed to go.

Her mother always scrupulously avoided that part of the New City, sniffing that it was “full of common people.” Alice’s nurserymaid dragged the gawping child through the masses of burly, sweaty men, reeking of salt and fish and whiskey and tobacco smoke, their teeth and clothes stained, their arms and faces so brown from the sun that they looked like visitors from some exotic Eastern land.

Everywhere there was noise and movement—men shouting, carrying barrels of goods, old sailors mending nets or sails, docks being scrubbed and supplies carted aboard for the next sailing.

There were a few people like Alice’s father, dressed in suits, speaking intently to captains. There were men who invested in ship’s concerns and kept scrupulous track of those investments.

There were others from the upper echelons of the New City, wrinkling their noses as they were led to ship’s quarters for a sea voyage. It would be lovely, she thought, to sail on a ship to a faraway country.

Her nursemaid halted before one of the smaller fishing boats, where she was hailed by a grinning young man with hair so pale it could not be called yellow and eyes of startling blue.

His name was Mathias, and he had a strange accent. He told Alice he was from a country of ice and snow, a place where there was barely anything green and the land was filled with white bears twice the size of a man.

Alice could hardly credit this, but Mathias said it was true. Then he put her on his knee and fed her some very strange dried fish that tasted mostly of salt and told her a story of a woman who fell in love with one of these great white bears, who was actually a prince in disguise.

This story so thrilled Alice that she wanted to go with Mathias back to his home, so that she too might marry a bear and live in a palace made of ice. He laughed and kissed her cheek and set her down. Then he and the nurserymaid (Why can I not recall her name? I remember his but not hers) had sat close on overturned barrels, holding hands and murmuring to each other while Alice played a game collecting odd things she found on the dock. A ripped bit of netting, an interesting rock, a tarnished coin from someplace far from the City. She ran to and fro, gathering things in a pile at their feet.

After a time she’d found everything within easy reach and strayed farther and farther in search of something interesting. Suddenly she looked up, and realized she could not see Mathias’ boat, and all around were the dizzying tall masts of ships and a busy crush of people who did not notice her.

She wanted to burst into tears but instead took one or two hesitant steps, hoping the movement would reveal the fishing boat nearby. But there was nothing familiar.

Alice felt her insides shrinking and all she wanted then was to be at home. It was nearly teatime, she was sure, and her stomach growled and her hands shook and she wanted her mother, wanted the sweet scent of roses to envelop her.

Then there was a man before her, a man clothed in the respectable suit and top hat of the New City, a man with a kind voice and hard, hungry eyes, offering to help her and pulling a sweet from his pocket.

She reached for it, forgetting her fear, forgetting the need to find her nurserymaid, and the man’s other hand reached out for her, to close around her.

Alice was a Magician, albeit one who did not know very much about her own magic. She was escaping a City that hated and feared Magicians, which was one of the reasons why she didn’t know so very much about it. Alice was tall and blue-eyed and a little broken inside, but her companion didn’t mind because his insides were more jumbled than hers could ever be.

She wished she could do something magical like in a fairy story—make a carpet to fly on, or summon up a handy unicorn to ride. It seemed very useless to be a Magician without spectacular tricks at hand.

At the very least she would have liked to be able to summon a bicycle, though the thought of Hatcher balancing on two wheels while holding his axe made her giggle. Anything would be better than this tunnel, an endless, narrow semidarkness with no relief in sight. She never would have entered it had she known it would take so long to get out again—three days at least, by her reckoning.

Alice thought it must be close to that long, although they had no true way to determine the passage of time.

They slept when they were tired, ate what little provisions they had left in the sack Hatcher carried. Soon enough they were hungry and thirsty, though it had become a familiar feeling and therefore just another discomfort. Food and water never seemed to be a regular occurrence since their escape from the hospital and its regular delivery of porridge morning and night.

During the long walk Alice dreamed of the open fields and trees that she would find at the end, a beautiful verdant land described by Pipkin, the rabbit they rescued from the Walrus’ fight ring. Anything, she thought, would be better than the crushing fog and darkness of the Old City.

Hatcher, in his own Hatcher way, alternated between moody silence and fits of mania. When not brooding he would run ahead of Alice and then back again over and over until he was white and breathless. Sometimes he stopped to box with the walls until his hands were bloody, or take chunks out of the wall with his axe. It seemed to Alice that there was more brooding and less running about than usual, though to be fair he had more to brood on.

He’d just remembered he had a daughter, more than ten years after she’d been sold to a trader far to the East. It wasn’t really his fault that he’d forgotten her, because the events of that day had turned him from Nicholas into the mad Hatcher he was now. Alice suspected that there was guilt and anger and helplessness all churned up inside him, and these feelings mixed with his dreams of blood and sometimes she saw all of this running over his face but he never spoke of it.

And, Alice thought, he’s probably a bit angry with me for putting him to sleep when it was time to face the Jabberwocky.

Alice didn’t regret the decision, though she knew it didn’t suit Hatcher’s notion of himself as her protector. Hatcher had a tendency to swing his axe first and think later, and as it happened, no blood-spilling had been required to defeat the ancient Magician.

She felt the reassuring weight of the little jar in her pants pocket, deliberately turned her mind away from it. Soon enough the Jabberwocky inside would be dead, if he were not already.

The tunnel, which proceeded along level ground since the initial entry into the Old City, sloped abruptly upward. It was then that Alice noticed the lanterns set at intervals had disappeared and that the interior of the cave was lightening.

Hatcher trotted up the steep incline while Alice labored after him, tripping several times and clawing in the dirt to push her body upright. Everything always seemed much harder for Alice, who was not as strong nor as graceful as Hatcher. Occasionally it seemed that her body was actively working against her progress.

When they finally emerged, blinking in the sunlight, Alice decided her disposition was not well suited to a life underground.

She crawled over the lip of the cave entrance, half blind after days underground and squinting through slitted eyes, expecting the soft brush of grass beneath her fingers. Instead there was something that felt like very fine ash, and a few scrubby gray plants poking brave faces toward the sun.

Alice forced her eyes to open wide. It took much more effort than it ought to; her eyes did not want all that glaring light and kept stubbornly closing against her will.

Hatcher ran ahead, already adjusted and seemingly glorying in the freedom after the constraint of the tunnel. She was aware of him as a half-formed shadow through her partially closed lids. He stopped suddenly, and his stillness made Alice struggle to her feet and take a proper look around. Once, she had she almost wished she hadn’t, for this wasn’t an improvement over their recent tunnel life.

They had emerged on the side of a hill that faced what must have once been an open meadow, perhaps dotted with wildflowers and trees and filled with tall grasses. Now there was nothing before them but a blackened waste stretching for miles, broken only by the occasional mound or hill.

“This isn’t what we expected,” Hatcher said.

“No,” Alice said, her voice faint. “What happened here?”

Hatcher shrugged. “There’s no one around to ask.”

Alice fought down the tears that threatened as she looked at the blight all around them. There was nothing to cry about here—no criminals kidnapping women, no streets lined with blood and corpses, no Rabbit to steal her away.

It’s only a wasteland. There’s no one here to hurt you or Hatcher. You can survive this. This is nothing.

Perhaps if she repeated this to herself often enough she could make it true. This is nothing, nothing at all.

But the promise of paradise beyond the walls of the City had sustained her, the dream of a mountain valley and the lake and a sky that was actually blue instead of gray. To have been through so much and discovered only this burned-out land seemed such a poor reward that crying seemed the only reasonable option. She let a few disappointed tears fall, saw them drop into the ash beneath her feet and immediately disappear. Then she scrubbed her face and told herself that was enough of that, thank you very kindly.

Alice walked around the hill to see what lay in the other direction. The New City sparkled in the distance, its high walls and tall white buildings shimmering on the horizon. Caught within the ring of the New City was the blackened sore of the Old City, completely encircled by its neighbor.

“I never realized it was so big,” Alice said as Hatcher joined her. His burst of energy had passed and he was subdued again, though by his troubles or by the landscape Alice did not know.

The combined Cities were a vast blot upon the landscape, stretching into the horizon. Of course it must be tremendous, Alice thought. It took them many days to cross from the hospital to the Rabbit’s lair, and still they had seen only a fraction of the Old City. The close-packed structures of the Old City had, somehow, made it seem smaller.

They had counted upon being able to forage for food and water once they escaped the tunnel, but that seemed impossible now.

“There must be a village or town somewhere,” she said to Hatcher. “Not everyone in the world comes from the City. And there must be something beyond this blight, else Cheshire and the other Magicians would not have been interested in maintaining the tunnel.”

Hatcher crouched and ran his fingers through the dark substance that covered the ground. “It was all burned.”

“I suppose,” she said. “But why would a Magician want to burn all the land in sight? And how recently has all this occurred? It seems the burning goes right up to the edge of the New City. How was it that the City was not burned too?”

“Whatever happened, you can be certain that no one in the City was told of it,” Hatcher said.

“But the residents of the New City,” Alice said. “How could such a thing occur without their notice?”

“You once lived in the New City,” Hatcher said. “Did you notice anything that you weren’t told to notice by the ministers?”

“No,” Alice admitted. “But then, I was a child when I lived there. I didn’t notice much beyond my own garden, and my governess, and my family.”

And Dor, she thought, but she didn’t say it aloud. Little Dor-a-mouse, scuttling for the Rabbit. Dor, who had sold Alice to a man who’d raped her, who’d tried to break her. Dor, her best friend in all the world.

Thinking of Dor made Alice remember their tea party with the Rabbit and the Walrus, and the enormous plate of cakes, beautiful cakes with high crowns of brightly colored frosting. She’d give anything for a cake right now, although not one of the Rabbit’s cakes, which had been filled with powders to make her sick and compliant.

For a moment she wished for one of Cheshire’s magic parcels filled with food, but then remembered that such a thing would require a connection to Cheshire that she didn’t want.

She might be able to summon up food for them. Her only excuse for not doing such a thing before was that she wasn’t yet accustomed to the idea of being a Magician. Perhaps, when they were far from the City, she could search for another Magician, one who might teach her. They couldn’t all be terrible, couldn’t all be like the Caterpillar and the Rabbit and Cheshire and the Jabberwocky.

She must stop thinking of the Jabberwocky. The wish had said she would forget him, and he would die because of that. So she needed to forget, because she never again wanted to see the results of the Jabberwocky’s rage. The streets of the Old City lined with bodies and rivers of blood, those streets utterly silent, nothing living remaining except her and Hatcher.

Much like this, really, Alice thought. Just her and Hatcher and the burned land.

Sitting in the ruins of what was probably magical fire, remembering the horrors committed by those men in the Old City, the belief of the existence of a good Magician seemed naïve.

“Maybe power corrupts them,” Alice said.

It was a frightening thought, one that made her suddenly reluctant to try any magic at all. She’d spent years under the influence of drugs that made her think she was insane. She was only just learning who Alice was, what it was like to be her own self. She would rather use no magic at all than become someone unrecognizable.

“Power corrupts who?” Hatcher asked.

“Hm?”

“You said, ‘Maybe power corrupts them.’”

“The Magicians,” she said. “We’ve yet to meet a decent one.”

“Yes,” Hatcher agreed. “That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. In the story Cheshire told us, a good Magician saved the world from the Jabberwocky. At least for a while.”

“Of course,” Alice said. “I’d forgotten.”

“It’s easy to forget the good things,” Hatcher said, and this statement seemed to set off another fit of brooding. He sat back in the ash and began idly drawing with the point of one of the many knives he carried.

Alice decided to leave him to it. Hatcher wasn’t voluble at the best of times, and forcing him to talk would only leave them both irritated.

It couldn’t hurt to try a little magic. They obviously weren’t going any farther at the moment, and Alice was hungry.

The only magic she had performed thus far—on purpose, anyway—had been in the form of wishing. She’d wished the Jabberwocky into a butterfly; she’d wished the connection between herself and Cheshire broken. A delicious meal should only be a wish away, then.

Alice sat a few feet away from Hatcher and his drawings. She noted that he wasn’t merely idly tracing shapes in the dirt. There appeared to be a pattern to his work, and the pattern was growing larger and more complex. He was on the balls of his feet now, crouched like a monkey, darting to and fro as he added to the design on the ground.

“What are you doing?” she asked, curious.

He grunted at her, and Alice frowned. Well, if he is going to be that way about it. She deliberately turned her back on his activity and concentrated on her own task.

First, she thought with a thrill of anticipation, what to wish for?

Alice had a terrible sweet tooth, one that had not been suppressed in the least by ten years of bland oat porridge. Her first instinct was to wish for plates of cookies and cakes, and a large pot of steaming tea and pretty china cups to pour the tea into. But that was not a practical wish. Even Alice knew that they could not walk for miles on nothing but frosting and butter.

What, then? Something that would pack up easily in Hatcher’s bag, and not spoil in this bleak, hot landscape. It was very hot, Alice realized. Beads of sweat had formed on her forehead and upper lip and trickled down her chest. The tunnel they’d left was cool and dark. Now the full scorch of the sun made the shirt and jacket and heavy trousers Alice wore cling to her skin, which resulted in her being more cross and more uncomfortable than she already was.

She took the jacket off, transferring the little knife she always carried to the belt of her trousers. She put her hands in front of her, palms down, though it felt a little foolish to do so. Alice had an odd idea that the magic would come out of her hands. She closed her eyes and focused hard on what she wanted.

“I wish for . . . six meat pies,” she decided. “And a dozen apples. And a jug of fresh milk.”

She opened her eyes and peered under her hands. Nothing. Only fine grey ash, and the hot wind lazily blowing it in little swirls and eddies.

Alice frowned. Now, why hadn’t that worked? She kept her hands in her lap this time, and repeated the words, staring at the blank space in front of her intently.

Again, nothing. She realized Hatcher had ceased his frenzy of activity and peered over her shoulder.

“I don’t think it works like that,” Hatcher said. He sounded almost normal, like the fever that seized him had passed.

“What do you know about it?” Alice snapped. She felt a little embarrassed, like she’d been caught being naughty.

Hatcher shrugged. “As much as you, I suppose. Or probably less.”

“Then why do you think it wouldn’t work?” Alice asked.

“You’re trying to make something out of nothing,” Hatcher said. “When you wished the Jabberwock into the jar as a butterfly, you were using the Jabberwock himself to start with. When you broke the connection between you and Cheshire, you were breaking something already in place. You didn’t start with nothing.”

Alice frowned. “And what about when I pushed the Jabberwocky away from you? I made something out of nothing then.”

Hatcher shook his head. “No. You used your own fear, your own love, and you pushed it toward the Jabberwock.”

“I’m hungry and thirsty,” Alice said. “Why can’t that make food, then, if love and fear can chase away a monster?”

“You’re the Magician,” Hatcher said, and he waited to see what she would do.